1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a method for geographic region detection of traffic infrastructure suitable for use in Road Side Units (e.g., receivers), wherein these Road Side Units can form an element of a cooperative system.
2. Description of the Related Art
Cooperative systems in connection with traffic infrastructure are the object of intensive current research and development. They are intended to make it possible for highway operators, traffic infrastructure, vehicles and their drivers as well as other road users to cooperate with one another in order to make possible a journey that is as efficient, safe and comfortable as possible.
To this end systems, are provided that make possible communication in the form of exchange of data between vehicles and infrastructure. Such communication systems are known for example by the acronyms V2R (Vehicle-to-Roadside) or V2V (Vehicle-to-Vehicle). These communication systems are abbreviated in Europe to ITS-G5 and in the USA to DSRC/WAVE.
The present invention relates to the field of V2R communication, in which Common Awareness Messages (CAM) are usually communicated from the vehicles that are part of road traffic to receive units of the infrastructure. The content of these CAM can be a very wide diversity of traffic-relevant data, such as information about the current position and speed of the communicating vehicle along with the associated point in time of the measurement.
This data is usually collected, evaluated and sent on to superordinate traffic control centers by the receive units. Finally, in these centers, macroscopic data averaged over certain route and time segments, such as traffic densities and journey speeds in specific route segments, for example, is analyzed. Congestion or also accident warnings can likewise be generated and output in this way, for example.
The communication between vehicles on a specific route segment and the receiver that is monitoring the segment is usually ongoing, i.e., with a high frequency of the CAM communications. In this case, the V2R communication begins when the vehicle enters the detection area of a receiver and ends when it leaves this detection area. The distance that a vehicle usually covers within such a detection area amounts to around 1 km and, within this detection area, there are many paths (different roadways or lanes of roadways) along which vehicles can travel. As a result, it is sensible in some cases to divide up the entire detection area into a number of segments, within which the collected data is averaged and edited for transfer to the superordinate traffic control centers.
To do this, it was previously necessary to detect the geographic topology of each traffic region manually before the commissioning of the receive unit, configure it in the receiver and define the corresponding segments into which the overall detection region was to be divided. Such configuration and detection is very time-consuming, therefore cost-intensive and must be done very accurately. Also, this process must be undertaken again when external circumstances change (e.g., after roadworks) or each time that the receiver is used in another route segment.